Well September is now upon us and we have approximately *looks at watch* 19 days till the launch of Halo 3: ODST.
Back in my ODST Fire Fight article I mentioned that I will be taking a trip down the Master Chief’s past, and give you reviews on the previous titles in the Halo saga. So now I present to you:
Being the keen FPS player that I am, the 2nd game I ever got for my Xbox was Halo (the first being the RAW Wrestling game that came with it). In all honesty before I played Halo, the last FPS game I really got into was Duke Nukem 3D on the PC. That seemed like an age away, so I had lost some of my FPS skill. That aside, Halo, for me was the rebirth of my love for FPS.
You start the game as the last Spartan, Spartans are super Marines that were wiped out by the Covenant a good few years ago. You have been revived as mankinds new hope in the war against the Covenant.
You are known as Master Chief, you wake up from your frozen sleep and suddenly the ship you are on is taken over by the pesky space aliens. So you start the game weaponless running through the ship getting to grips with jump, duck and so on, until low and behold the captain gives you a gun. Yay! You shoot your way through aliens, but eventually the ship goes down and you have evacuate. As you do so you crash land on a mysterious ring-world. Not going to spoil too much here but lets say the rest of the story is aimed at you discovering what it is, and doing something about it.
Halo goes back to FPS basics while throwing in some nice little new additions to keep the game feeling like a fresh new title but still keeping the core FPS gaming we all love. Shooting the living crap out of space aliens is always the best route to go down, and Halo does it beautifully, you have your Right Trigger for shoot, Left Trigger for grenade, B for melee attack, X to reload/interact and Y to change weapon. What I thought was quite odd to start off with, is that Master Chief can only carry two weapons at a time, pretty unusual seeing as I was used to FPS games that can carry at least 10 weapons on your person. Even though this was a little strange I got used to it eventually.
You have a great variety of weapons to find around each level. Anything from poxy little pistols to great huge Rocket Launchers, that’s not all though, you also can wield some of the Covenant weapons too, such as a plasma rifle, or my particular favorite, the Needler, this baby shoots flurry of pink needles that home into your target andmake them explode in a cloud of pink mist. If used correctly enemies don’t stand a chance.
The same goes for grenades, you have 2 types of grenade in the game, the plasma grenade which is the Covenant sticky grenade, which surprisingly sticks to enemies and kills them in an instant. Then there are your bog-standard frag grenades which just go boom.
One thing I do love about this game is the nice amount of enemy variety. You have your standard grunts, but in this game they are more of a novelty, they are small, pathetic, and are easy to scare, they mean well in battle but once the bigger enemies around them are dead, they just run for their lives. You then have the Jackals, again a bit feeble, but they have a shield they hide behind and have better accuracy, in large numbers they can be a bugger. Then there are the elites, these are big and ruthless, they don’t back down from a fight. They come in two varieties; the invisible variety or the overshield variety. Each as annoying as each other but pose a great challenge. Then there are the tanks, the huge aliens known as Hunters, they have shields massive green projectile guns and take a lot to kill. Great fun though.
Earlier I mentioned that this game brings something relatively new to the FPS genre, and that is the use of vehicles. In some levels of the game you are supplied with a Warthog. This is a 4 wheel drive beast with a mounted mini gun for a gunner to use, great to get around in and run aliens over, but my favorite is the Ghost. This is a Covenant vehicle which has 2 guns for the driver to use and is pretty nippy. With those two vehicles, you also get to control a scorpion tank, with a mini gun and the mortar launcher you cannot go for wrong with this war machine.
Graphically the game looks really good for an Original Xbox title, the outside environments look lush and living, the use of colour is well thought out, and nothing looks out of place. One of the great things about this game is the skyline in some of the outside levels. If you look towards the heavens you can see the rest of the ring world go over your head, and it looks amazing.
Halo for me hits all the buttons, great game play, a good story, a nice variety of enemies and the vehicles are a great addition to an FPS. If you haven’t played Halo: Combat Evolved, or indeed any other game in the series. I suggest you do so right now.
Garv!
